by Alice Bell
The walk across town had taken forever. I’d passed by the front door of my building and thought about crawling into bed. I was afraid if I went to sleep, I would never wake up. I kept walking.
I rested my forehead on the cool pane of her door. When I turned the handle, it caught. I closed my eyes. Using my last ounce of strength, I broke the lock.
Inside, a low murmur caught my attention. It sounded like a man’s voice upstairs. I couldn’t hone in. My powers were waning. I felt sick, like I had on the long bus ride up to Tikal, the night the woman in the back of the bus lifted her blanket and her skirt.
I thought of her breath in my ear, her ecstasy filling me with strength.
I gripped the banister, as I went up the stairs. The man’s voice carried down the hall. Was it that bastard, Henry Thorne? I had the idea to smash my fist into his face. I had told her to go to him but she should have known I didn’t mean it.
Or had I?
She should know better.
Her bedroom door was closed. I leaned against it and listened.
“Come here…sit next to me,” the man said. I tried to remember the sound of Henry’s voice. “Don’t be afraid. That’s nice, baby. Now let me see your pretty little stockings.”
I didn’t like the way he talked to her, like she was his plaything, but I was too weak to do anything about it. I stood there, on the other side of the door, disgusted by what was happening inside and knowing I couldn’t stop it.
We missed the ferry to the island and caught a ride on a fishing boat. Huge waves rocked the boat from side to side.
The memory slammed behind my eyes. Maybe I didn’t want to remember. Maybe I wanted to feel nothing except Ruby’s naked body next to mine. I wished like hell I hadn’t sent her back to the bar.
I heard her giggle.
“The first time I saw those great big gorgeous…lips of yours, I knew we had a real connection, doll. They don’t make dames like you anymore.”
Dames? I could barely make a fist, let alone throw a punch. I flung open the door.
My gaze bounced crazily off her empty bed, across the room, back to the bed and to her radio. “And that’s it folks. Join us next week for another episode of I Was A Private Dick.” Funky music blasted. Christ, it was a farce. I groped for the volume to turn it off, before my head exploded.
A slant of light from the door made a skinny rectangle on the floor. I crept closer. Water splashed. I heard her intake of breath and felt her fear.
I put my eye to the opening.
She was in the bath, sitting up, erect and staring, waiting. Her breasts glistened. I pushed open the door.
“Ruby, it’s me…”
She reached for a towel, and tried to wrap it around her body. The ends floated out. She got up and almost fell, losing the towel when she grabbed the sides of the tub with both hands. Water swept out.
Little kids cried and hid under the seats. Zadie vomited over the side of the boat.
I had to lean against the wall so I wouldn’t collapse. I slid down and sat on the cold tiled floor. My heart beat like it was going to jump out of my chest.
She sat down in the tub, drawing up her knees and hugging them. I wondered if I had changed somehow, turned into Quasimodo, the way she looked at me with her big eyes.
Had my extraordinary powers of attraction evaporated? And now I was a regular guy slumped on her bathroom floor?
Yeah, not that sexy.
When she finally spoke, her voice was tender. “Are you sick?”
“I needed to see you, that’s all.”
“You’re a wreck,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s contagious.” I lowered my head.
“You don’t?” she sounded doubtful.
I could envision her pout, like the night we met, though I couldn’t look at her because I was holding back another wave of nausea by keeping my eyes on a spot on the floor. For all I knew, I could turn her into what I had become just by kissing her, though she seemed to have come through the first kiss intact.
The rush of water going down the drain reminded me of something.
Her bare wet feet came into my line of vision. My gaze came up to her slender calves, the backs of her silky thighs. She wriggled into a white nightgown with a high lacy neck. I reached out to grip her ankle.
She turned to me. Her gown, clinging to her damp skin, showed me the outline of her nipples.
“Want me to call an ambulance?” She knelt on the hard floor and put her hand on my face. “Did you take something dangerous? Like heroin, or…I don’t know. You’re burning with fever.”
“I didn’t take anything,” I said. “I’m not on drugs.”
I managed to stand up. The nausea had eased and it was from her being next to me in that see-through gown. But when I caught sight of the drenched towel lying at the bottom of the tub, my gut wrenched.
Zadie’s pink dress washed up on the shore.
* * *
She smoothed the sheets on her unmade bed. “Don’t you want to sleep?” she said.
“With you.” I took her hand and pulled her toward me.
She held back but I felt her hunger, like mine. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her. Her heart fluttered, like the wings of a trapped bird. My lips grazed the crook of her neck. “Get in bed,” I whispered.
The sheets were cool. We lay facing each other.
I pushed up her gown and she shivered. Her breath came fast. With every frantic beat of her heart, I felt my strength coming back.
I guided her hand to my jeans. She undid the buttons, like I wanted. I put her hand inside. I liked the way she seemed to be waiting for me to show her what to do next. When I paused, thinking of what would give me the most pleasure, pain sliced through my ribcage.
I cried out.
“Oh, God, did I hurt you?” she sounded panicked.
Another blow hit me in the stomach.
14. Ruby
“DEVON?” I was still reeling from the feel of him in my hand. I longed to have him in my mouth, inside me.
But he moaned. His skin gleamed with sweat. Drugs seemed the most likely cause of his sudden illness. Not that I knew much about drugs, beyond the ones prescribed by my shrink. I’d always been scared of anything harder than alcohol.
Of course, it could be the flu, or worse, sexually transmitted. Part of me knew he was a player and I should be careful. A bigger part of me loved the way his touch was so sure. And demanding. I’d been about to throw caution to the wind. Maybe fate had intervened, giving me a moment to rethink the situation, to be smarter, even self-preserving.
And yet, taking in the shape of his face, his sensual lips, I felt only pure, irresistible attraction. “Do you need aspirin?” I said. “Want me to leave you alone for a while?”
“It’s too bright in here,” he said.
There was only one lamp lit, across the room. I turned it off.
“Close the curtains too,” he said.
I told myself he had a migraine but I didn’t really believe it. I was afraid no matter what I found out about him, whatever turned out to be the cause of his illness, contagious or not, I would throw myself at him, as if to my own death, like a Kamikaze fighter.
Already, emptiness was starting to gnaw inside me. The idea of spending the rest of the night alone, like usual, while he was in my bed, seemed especially cruel, to be so close and yet so far. But he said, “Stay.”
I curled up under the covers. His arm across my body was heavy. I never wanted to leave this dark place, next to him.
15. Devon
I KNEW it wasn’t the flu or a virus because I was immune to those common human ailments. I didn’t contract them and I didn’t carry them. And yet I was still waiting for the kiss in the bar to show side effects. I could fuck her senseless but a kiss might turn her into a monster.
All I wanted to do was kiss her again.
I resisted the urge by pressing myself against her. It felt so pointless, an act I’d do
ne too many times, sustaining myself from one night to the next. It had never given me what I truly wanted. Though what that might be was indefinable, showing itself only as a desire to inhale her very being, as if I couldn’t get close enough to her.
She tried to turn over, to face me but I clamped my arm down tighter, so she couldn’t move. “Stay where you are,” I said, in her ear.
It reminded me of the night in the bar, when she pretended to be Heathcliff telling Catherine not to look at him with her lying eyes. I didn’t want her to look at my eyes. And I didn’t want to be tempted by the sight of her vulnerable lips.
* * *
The air was steamy and made our skin slick. Overhead, a fan turned slowly.
Zadie.
The sun was going down, red and pink and orange. Monkeys howled and the sound echoed through the trees. Waves lapped on the shore, leaving tiny bubbles, like white lace.
Damp sand shifted beneath my bare feet. I pushed open a wooden door painted purple.
She was in the four poster bed, naked. I pulled off my jeans and lifted the mosquito net to crawl in next to her. The diaphanous cloth fluttered around us, moved by a fan that hung from the beam of the thatched roof.
She turned over to face me. Her cheeks were flushed. She had soft brown eyes and a plain face made beautiful by something inside her. She gave off an air of enjoying secret thoughts you longed to hear but she would never share.
She was often kind but could be cruel. If you hurt her.
She had naturally platinum blonde hair. Her breasts were small and perky, her legs wouldn’t quit. She closed her eyes.
We started kissing.
My hand went down, between her legs. Her breathing shifted. My erection stroked along her inner thigh. I eased my way in. She was so wet. I had to pull out, so I wouldn’t come too fast. We did it slow and lazy with her making soft moans, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I rolled her so I was on top. My arms trembled. I took a deep breath. She tilted her hips and opened for me. I pushed deeper, a little at a time, covering her cries with my mouth.
We writhed and twisted on the bed. She wrapped her long legs around me. We came together.
I saw myself reflected in her eyes.
* * *
She was always restless, afterward.
“Come on, Devon. What are you an old man? Don’t go to sleep.” She bit my shoulder.
“Ow. Okay…in a minute,” I put the pillow over my head.
At some point, I woke and she was gone. When she came back, I was awake and sitting up. She had a pineapple. She put it on the hand-carved table, like a centerpiece. “There’s a mean monkey out there,” she said. “He threw things at me.”
“How do you know it’s a he?”
She giggled.
Later, when we took the same path to the bar, something small and hard hit me in the back of the head.
Zadie laughed. She pointed up to a high tree branch. “That’s him,” she said. It was a largish brown monkey whose eyes glimmered and whose testicles were glaring white. “That color doesn’t seem like the best idea,” I said. “Why call attention to your valuables?”
“Maybe the girls like it,” she said.
There was a party having tapas at a long table in the courtyard, mostly men, and they were foreign, like us. You could always tell. There was one woman, sitting with her back to us. I recognized her instantly. She sat so straight, hyper-alert, like a cat watching a mouse. The sheen of her lustrous dark hair and the way it fell around her shoulders was exactly the same, as if I’d seen her yesterday.
She followed the gaze of her male companions and turned.
“Oh my God,” Zadie said. “Enid? Enid…”
They squealed, like the girls they’d been together, falling into each other’s arms and hugging for too long.
I felt hollow, as if everything that had been so right, was about to go all wrong.
Part Two
THE NIGHTMARE started with the sound of an approach…a key turning in the lock. I had only my sweaty fists for weapons. But I stood by the bed, ready. I was going to kill. With my bare hands.
16. Devon
Ometepe, Nicaragua
EVERYONE WANTS to party. The bar is open-air, lit by torches. Enid’s friends think of themselves as musicians. They have guitars and bongo drums and play Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Music from our adolescence.
I can’t get down any more beer and the night has just started.
Enid is dancing. She thinks she’s sexy, in her red and orange sarong that covers her bikini in mock modesty. At some point, someone picks out the Flaming Lips song, She Don’t Use Jelly, on their guitar.
Naturally, Enid sings, giggling and flirting with her eyes, like the funny lyrics about the girl who butters her toast with Vaseline are the height of wit she made up herself. We’re almost thirty and we’re making asses of ourselves in what seems like an attempt to be young again.
What bothers me is that it does take me back and it feels purposeful, like Enid has thrown a net over me. She keeps flashing sultry looks in my direction and Zadie doesn’t notice because she’s actually having fun. And that annoys me too.
Zadie tries to get me to dance. I’m half tempted because she’s wearing my favorite dress. It’s pink and very short. But I shrug her off. She puts her face next to mine, her breath full of whisky. “Devon’s being an old fart again, wants to go home and put on his jammies…and take out his teeth.”
It’s not like her. When she levels you, she does it with class. “You’re drunk,” I say.
She spins away and starts dancing with Enid and the guys drool, which is the whole point, I think. “See you later,” I head down the path, back to our casa.
Moonlight spills through the trees. I’m not tired but I peel off my jeans and T-shirt and get in bed. No jammies. Jesus. As I lay there, staring up at a hole in the mosquito net, a mosquito whines in my ear. I slap at it.
My mind conjures unsavory images of what’s going on back at the bar. Not that I’ll go back there. I hate that kind of knuckle-dragging shit. Besides, drunk or not, I trust Zadie. That’s not what’s bothering me.
I suspect Enid’s stalking us. It’s a small island in a small country, way off the beaten track. She shows up, randomly, in a bar known only to backpackers? Where’s her damned backpack?
I first met Enid at camp. For spoiled rich kids. Black vans with leather seats took us into town once a week. We played tennis on expensively maintained grass courts and swam and canoed on a quiet lake with a cluster of summer homes at the far end. Our camp experience didn’t come close to the rustic conditions Zadie and I had encountered backpacking through a third world country.
Enid was cute but didn’t reach her full beauty until later, in high school. On the last night, during campfire, we sat by each other and she passed me a note with a map that told me precisely where to meet her after ‘lights out’.
I guess we had a thing that summer, an eighth grade type thing, secret glances, accidental touching, and awkward kid stuff. I probably told one friend I liked her and she told twelve friends she liked me. It culminated into one big make-out session the last night.
She was the first girl whose breasts I touched, who let me put my hand down her pants. I remember there were different types of kissing and she was also the first girl I ‘tongued’. Christ, it’s pitiful to be that age.
In the fall, when we ended up at the same high school, she acted like we were engaged, trying to hold my hand, waiting at my locker, calling me, constantly. One night, on the phone, I told her to knock it off. “Quit stalking me,” I said and hung up.
The next morning at school, she was holding hands with some other guy and I was relieved. I didn’t consider how strange it was that she had, in a matter of hours, taken up with someone else.
Zadie was in three of my classes, Enid in none, thank God.
Zadie was quiet but not shy. When she spoke in class, she could be scathing. She always sat on the edge
of the classroom, in an outer aisle, near a window. I found myself watching her, noticing how she scribbled in her notebook when she got bored by the discussion. She sketched cartoons and wrote little captions I couldn’t make out.
What really drove me crazy was how her uniform barely concealed her long legs. And she didn’t notice me, so I thought about her a lot, concocting ways to capture her attention.
We met, officially, through Enid.
Enid was the leader of the hot girls. Like in class, Zadie stayed on the fringes. She was a head taller than the other girls and not nearly as pretty in the way they were, with their long shiny hair and glossy lips. But she gave me the aches.
When I saw Enid and Zadie exchanging notes in the hall, I went up to them. “Hey, Enid,” I said. “How’s it going?” I guess I probably stared at Zadie because I remember locking eyes with her. To me, it was as if only Zadie and I existed. Enid was just a conduit.
I never dated any other classmates, besides Zadie, but I met girls outside of school. Sometimes I was the one who wanted a break, sometimes it was Zadie. We had an innate understanding that the others were simply passing through our lives, marking a phase.
We always went back to each other and sometimes, we discussed our other lovers, revealing intimacies and making unfair comparisons.
Meanwhile, Enid had outgrown her status as the cutest girl in school and gone on to full-blown beauty. She lorded it over the rest of us. Zadie and I had private jokes about her but every once in a while, I caught Zadie gazing at her, like she would trade places with Enid, even though we’d deemed her existence vain and vacuous.
By senior year, I’d moved out of the house into my parent’s guest house. I started having a recurring nightmare.
It came as breathing, heavy in my ear, warm on my face. My eyes would snap open to another pair of eyes watching me sleep. Always, I shot up out of bed and groped for the light. I couldn’t quite believe there wasn’t really someone, or something there.
I never told anyone. I was about to go out in the world on my own, for the first time, and the dream was probably classic anxiety. Like dreaming you’re in public and realize you’re naked, or that you’ve entirely fucked off a required class, and now you have to take the exam.